The top of safety advocacy at Datadog, a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform, has urged enterprises in Australia and the APAC area to speed up phasing out long-lived credentials for fashionable hyperscale cloud companies, warning that they continue to be a severe knowledge breach danger.
Talking with TechRepublic, Andrew Krug highlighted findings from Datadog’s State of Cloud Safety 2024 report, which recognized long-lived credentials as a persistent safety danger issue. Whereas credential administration practices are bettering, Krug famous they don’t seem to be advancing as shortly or successfully as wanted to mitigate dangers.
Lengthy-lived credentials are nonetheless a giant risk to cloud safety
The report revealed that almost half (46%) of organisations utilizing AWS depend on IAM customers for human entry to cloud environments — a follow Datadog referred to as a type of long-lived credential. This was true even for organisations utilizing centralised id administration to grant entry throughout a number of techniques.
Furthermore, almost one in 4 relied solely on IAM customers with out implementing centralised federated authentication. In accordance with Datadog, this highlights a persistent concern: whereas centralised id administration is turning into extra widespread, unmanaged customers with long-lived credentials proceed to pose a major safety danger.
The prevalence of long-lived credentials spans all main cloud suppliers and sometimes consists of outdated or unused entry keys. The report discovered that 62% of Google Cloud service accounts, 60% of AWS IAM customers, and 46% of Microsoft Entra ID functions had entry keys that have been greater than a 12 months previous.
Lengthy-lived credentials include a major danger of knowledge breaches
Lengthy-lived cloud credentials by no means expire and often get leaked in supply code, container photographs, construct logs, and software artifacts, in response to Datadog. Previous analysis performed by the corporate has proven they’re the most typical reason behind publicly documented cloud safety breaches.
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Krug mentioned there’s mature tooling available in the market to make sure secrets and techniques don’t find yourself in manufacturing environments, reminiscent of static code evaluation. Datadog’s report additionally notes the rise of IMDSv2 enforcement in AWS EC2 cases, an necessary safety mechanism to dam credential theft.
There are much less long-lived credentials, however change is simply too gradual
There have been strikes to mitigate the issue, reminiscent of AWS launching IAM Identification Centre, permitting organisations to centrally handle entry to AWS functions. Whereas corporations are within the course of of adjusting to the service, Krug mentioned, “I simply don’t know that everybody considers this their highest precedence.”
“It undoubtedly ought to be, as a result of if we look on the final 10 years of knowledge breaches, the first theme is that long-lived entry key pairs have been the foundation reason behind these knowledge breaches mixed with overly permissive entry,” he defined. “If we remove one facet of that, we actually considerably scale back the chance for the enterprise.”
The long-lived credentials drawback isn’t unique to APAC — it’s a worldwide concern
In accordance with Krug, APAC isn’t any totally different from the remainder of the world. With no regulation to regulate the administration of long-lived credentials within the cloud in any specific jurisdiction, corporations worldwide use related approaches with related cloud suppliers, usually throughout a number of international jurisdictions.
What’s stopping the transfer away from long-lived credentials?
The hassle required to transition groups to single sign-on and momentary credentials has slowed the adoption of those practices. Krug mentioned the “elevate and shift” concerned in migrating growth workflows to single sign-on may be appreciable. That is partly because of the mindset shift required and partly as a result of organisations should present ample help and steerage to assist groups adapt.
Nonetheless, he famous that instruments like AWS Identification Centre, which has been out there for 3 years, have made this transition extra possible. These instruments are designed to scale back developer friction by streamlining the authentication course of, minimising the necessity for repeated MFA sign-ins repeatedly, and guaranteeing that workflows stay environment friendly.
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“AWS Identification Centre is a good product and allows these very seamless person flows, however people are nonetheless midstream in migrating to it,” Krug mentioned.
What must you do along with your long-lived credentials?
Datadog’s report warned that it’s unrealistic to count on that long-lived credentials may be securely managed. The seller recommends that corporations undertake safe identities with fashionable authentication mechanisms, leverage short-lived credentials, and actively monitor adjustments to APIs that attackers generally use.
“Organisations ought to leverage mechanisms that present time-bound, momentary credentials,” the report mentioned.
Workloads. For workloads, Datadog mentioned this finish may be achieved with IAM roles for EC2 cases or EKS Pod Identification in AWS, Managed Identities in Microsoft Azure, and repair accounts connected to workloads for Google Cloud if the organisation makes use of the main international hyperscalers.
People: For human customers, Datadog mentioned the simplest answer is to centralise id administration utilizing an answer like AWS IAM Identification Middle, Okta, or Microsoft Entra ID and keep away from utilizing particular person cloud customers for every worker, which it labelled “extremely inefficient and dangerous.”